There’s a present day epidemic;
young women are being murdered —in the movies. In
Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, 14-year-old
Susie Salmon played by Saoirse Ronan is raped and murdered
near her home. The dead girl is intent on killing the
murderer, whose death would release her from the clouds
and gain her entrance to heaven. In Pierre Morel’s
Taken, Bryan Mills, played by Liam Neeson, suffers
the murder of his daughter. His response? “I know
who you are. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll
be the end of it. I will not lok for you. But if you don’t,
I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill
you.” Martin Campbell’s Edge of Darkness
finds Thomas Craven in pursuit of the shotgun slayer of
his 24-year-old daughter. Forget the law. Justice is too
slow. These survivors want revenge. Whether or not we,
the theatergoers, believe that they are doing the right
thing by taking the law into their own hands, tales of
retaliation have a way of riveting us to our seats.

7 Days, or Les 7 jours du talion as
it is known in its native Quebec, is such a film. It’s
the closest thing to torture porn the movie industry has
produced in recent times. Bruno Hamel (Claude Legault),
the principal character in Daniel Grou’s film is
a kind, gentle doctor. His personality undergoes some
change when the body of his 8-year-old daughter, Jasmine
(Rose-Marie Coallier), is disco red. The killer, Anthony
Lemaire (Martin Dubreuil), has been arrested, thanks to
a DNA match from his semen and he stands to go to jail
for 15-25 years. But that’s not enough of a punishment
for the doc.

At least half the film deals with the
reaction at home. The doc’s wife, Sylvie (Fanny
Mallette), grieves, but is determined to wipe the event
from her mind, while the leading police detective, Hervé
Mercure (Rémy Girard), is determined to bring the
killer to justice the legal way. Going the legal route
is no fun for the audience, though, so the other half
of the picture shows a silent Dr. Hamel, who has managed
to get the killer kidnapped from a police van, torturing
his daugher's muderer in a deserted cottage by a lake
with the intention of making him suffer for seven days.
Afterwards, he plans to kill him .

Claude Legault turns in an impressive
role, of a respected, calm surgeon who literally goes
insane with grief. The torture he slowly and methodically
inflicts on his victim, who at first denies the crime
and later seems to brag about it perhaps to hasten his
own death, is graphic. Curare, a drug that paralyzes the
motor sense while leaving the victim conscious, is put
to delightful use, while scalpels, ropes, chains, cuffs
and the like allow the doctor to do as he wishes with
the moaning, yelling, cursing sex predator—played
quite well by Martin Dubreuil. The doctor's pledge, “Prinum
non nocere” (first do no harm)?, has certainly slipped
Dr. Hamel’s mind.

7 Days, is filmed by
Bernard Couture in black-and-white with a sickly-green
patina. It opened January 22, 2010 as Sundance Festival
midnight show. If you liked any of the Saw series,
The Devil’s Rejects, Wolf Creek,
or even The Passion of the Christ, you’ll
dig this picture.

Wonder not why James Cameron, known
the free world over for his Terminator series,
Titanic, Aliens and Rambo II,
chose the name Pandora for the location of his new film.
The film opens a Pandora’s box of questions regarding
situations that are not 4.4 light years from the Earth
during the middle of the 22nd century, but issues here
on our own planet at the current time. Potential viewers
cannot be blamed for asking themselves the likes of these
queries: If I root for the blue people against my own
fellow Westerners in the final battle, does that mean
I have to oppose the American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Will I ever again be content to go to the Sundance Festival
to see movies that feature wholly human relations, like
a romance between two people who look more or less like
me? Where can I recycle my TV with its puny 60-inch screen?
Will the studio earn back its $400 million cost on opening
day, or will it have to wait for the entire weekend? Will
I be able to sit still in the theater for just under three
hours without having to go to the bathroom?

Avatar is actually nothing
new to people who have seen the likes of 2012,
Spiderman, and for that matter whatever you’ll
find on Jim Cameron’s resume. But it does take computer
graphics to a new level, situating live actors with some
ferocious people of a different color and animals that
could treat Leo and even Godzilla as though they were
between-meal snacks. The color is vivid, brilliant; the
action races the hearts of the folks in the audience;
the pace is so fast although with appropriate breaks that
the 166 minutes—or just 150 if you don’t stay
for the end-credits—will go by so rapidly that when
the title Avatar comes up after the final scene,
you’ll say, “What, already—or is this
a mid-film intermission?” Aside from the action,
the stuff that kids under the age of thirteen will be
concerned with exclusively, Cameron has a political subtext,
one which condemns modern imperialism while glorifying
the lives of native people who want only to be left in
peace regardless of even the good intentions of the great
powers.

Avatar was 15 years in the
making; Cameron began writing the script in 1994 but had
the patience to wait until the full capacity of Western
technology could do his film justice. Filmed largely in
a humongous New Zealand studio, the picture pits the honorable
Na’vi clan that lives in a South-American-style
forest against the imperialist Marines who have the job
of either convincing the natives to move out of their
habitat into a remote area or removing them by using twenty-second
century mechanized warfare to commit genocide. Pandora
is valuable to Earth because it contains a rare mineral
that could harness energy when the Earth’s natural
resources have been used up.

The Na’vi people are taller, bluer
than the earthlings, and they speak their own language
(1000 words of which were made up by Cameron’s crew
from scratch)—intelligible to us in the audience
thanks to bold subtitles that stand out three-dimensionally
from the action. But most of the communication is in English,
given that some of the Na’vi have learned it from
those who colonized a distant area of their moon. Jake
Sully (Sam Worthington) anchors the proceedings, a Marine
now in a wheelchair as a result of a war injury, now called
in to replace his twin brother who was killed. He becomes
the man of the hour simply by entering a machine that
looks exactly like a sun-tanning device, then telepathically
controlling the actions of a blue man constructed by the
earthlings with Jake’s DNA. (This strategy is not
unlike the American practice of using pilot less drones
to bomb terrorist areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan.)
Jake is at first dismissed as a useless cripple by Col.
Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a stereotypical Marine
commander who appears to be carved out of granite. But
he becomes invaluable when he learns information about
the blue people, information that could lead to a successful
negotiation and the moving out of the Na’vis.

The plot is simple enough. The visuals
are the thing. And my oh my, what sensational sights!
Fearsome animals include dragon-like flying monsters,
beautiful, strange-looking insects, dog-like creatures
that more than once launch attacks on Jake’s avatar,
though Jake is rescued time and again by the beautiful
Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) who, like Pocahontas’s rescue
of John Smith, turns up to prevent her people from killing
the intruder. Romance follows, but there’s nothing
here that could challenge the movie’s PG-13 rating,
not even the near-naked bodies that populate the land.

The napalm that the earthlings utilize
from air and on land will remind us of the horrors inflicted
on the Vietnamese people during the sixties and seventies,
while a marmoreal Col. Quaritch stands in for, say the
“bomb-‘em-back-to-the-stone-age" General
Curtis LeMay of Vietnam War fame. Ultimately it’s
Jake who, together with scientist Grace (Sigourney Weaver)
"turns coat" to battle with the natives in the
mother of all battles, concluding the movie in much the
way that fireworks please viewers by saving the major
shock and awe until last.

Sam Worthington is far better known
in his native England and in Australia than in the U.S.,
though many have seen him in Terminator 4, maybe
a few in Geoffrey Rush’s Macbeth. His smashing
performance will show that you don’t need Harrison
Ford, Tom Cruise or Arnold Schwarzenegger to keep the
box office registers humming.

What happens to a star, an alpha male
who attracts women like honey to a fly, when he’s
just about washed up? Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart
is a realistic look at such a man. Adapting Thomas Cobb’s
1987 novel, Cooper sticks close to the page, keeping his
principal performer at the age of 57, with all the baggage
towed by a guy whose career is now at an impasse. The
plot is nothing special, just an ordinary, slow-moving
tale with a predictable trajectory, but Fox Searchlight
may have green lighted the movie because of the potential
awards that Jeff Bridges might be expected to garner.
Bridges, a 60-year-old veteran performer whose best role
to date has been as the Dude in the Coen Brothers’
The Big Lebowski (about a man who is mistaken
for a millionaire of the same name and pursued by thugs).
Bridges shone in Lebowski, benefiting from the
stellar screenplay the Coens gave him. Here, he does a
bang-up job even with a prosaic script. Bridges delivers
a performance which could propel him even into this year’s
Oscar race.

Filled with country-cowboy songs that
Cooper allows us to hear almost in entirety, Crazy
Heart demonstrates the talented Bridges as a singer
as well as an actor. This film also has Colin Farrell
singing; he charms the movie audience with both a guitar
and his well-known magnetism.

In a story of human limitations, Bad
Blake (Jeff Bridges) is down on his luck. Despite his
still-good voice, his role in the country-song circuit
is restricted to third-rate places including a bowling
alley in New Mexico, a state whose blazing sun and wide
spaces are captured nicely by photographer Barry Markowitz.
Blake is stymied by his alcoholism and chain-smoking,
the latter unusual for someone dependent for a living
on his voice. When Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal),
a Santa Fe journalist, sets up an interview with him in
his motel room, you can sense the chemistry despite the
score-and-a-half age difference between them.

Blake has mixed feelings when his agent
sets him up in the big time as an opener for country music
star Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), a man with whom Blake
started his career but who had quickly eclipsed the aging
crooner. Sporting a scruffy gray beard and a huge head
of hair, Blake slowly works his wiles with the young reporter,
a woman who in the usual formulaic pattern of movies of
this nature would be the man’s redeemer, sobering
him up, even getting him to chew gum and throw away the
Marlboros. He is making great progress with her until
a near-tragedy occurs involving Jean’s four-year-old
boy (Jack Nation in his freshman role).

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the formerly
married reporter with her lovely blue eyes wide open,
in much the way her character, Jean, enters an affiliation
with a fellow who has been through four marriages and
who has not seen his own child since the boy was four.
Unquestionably this is Jeff Bridges’s movie, one
with an ample supply of delightful singing and more than
respectable ensemble acting.

What’s the cinema world coming
to when January releases are actually good?

The Spierig Brothers’ Daybreakers
is actually better than good, turning the vampire story
on its ass and introducing some exciting and fresh elements
into the ubiquitous and pervasive genre.

For me, True Blood has raised
the vamp-bar so high, no brooding teen WB show or soapy,
angst-filled “saga” can even come close to
the genius of the Alan Ball show. And when something attacks
the public in popularity the way the undead have in the
last few years, the rip-offs, knock-offs and general vamp-crap
just keeps hitting every medium until we are blood-soaked,
so to speak.

Daybreakers proves there is
still life in the genre (do what you want with the pun).
It’s a refreshing and inventive film with actual
three-dimensional characters that are NOT teens and are
allowed journeys. It also has a compelling narrative.
And it contains good performances.

It’s 2019 and a mysterious calamity
has transformed the majority of the worlds citizens into
vampires making the few humans left hunted species—if
caught they’re farmed for the vamp population—who
are on the verge of running out of blood.

Ethan Hawke broods magnificently as
Edward Dalton, a hematologist who is trying to find a
blood substitute to stop the catastrophe. Edward is soon
tossed into a frenzy when he encounters a gaggle of humans
and discovers one of them might hold the key to a cure.

Along the slaughterous way we are introduced
to “Subsiders,” mutations who are scary, evil
and desperate. (and fun to watch!) And there is gore galore!

Hawke leads a crackerjack ensemble.
Willem Dafoe is a delight as “Elvis.” Australian
star Claudia Karvan is captivating and needs to get more
work here in the states. Ditto Michael Dorman, who has
leading man potential.

Daybreakers has a slick and stylized look about
it. All tech credits rock—especially the photography
and production design. The film brought to mind District
9, another audacious film. Who said they’re
not writing original scripts anymore.

Besides containing clever and cutting
dialogue, Daybreakers indirectly blasts the pharmaceutical
companies that have potential treatments and cures but
would rather allow greed to rule the day. The film also
draws parallels with the various and heinous forms of
genocide that have gone on and are still going on in our
world.

I have never been a splatter fan
but Daybreakers is so much more than that. It’s
a smart and savvy spin on an old (and increasingly tired)
subject.

Dr. Parnassus is not the only one who
ever sold his soul to the devil. That negotiation has
been a popular one all over the world from the time that
Satan first approached Eve. According to lore, Satan has
no power over human beings unless we do evil: Victims
of these pacts have included Faust, who sold
out for youth and for the hand of Marguerite and who is
either condemned or saved depending upon the production,
and Joe Hardy of Damn Yankees, who also wanted
youth but only so he could return to his days as a baseball
slugger to help the Washington Senators. In Imaginarium,
director and co-writer Terry Gilliam has his title character,
Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), sell his soul in
return for immortality. But the devil will get his due:
he will claim the doctor’s daughter, Valentina (Lily
Cole) on her sixteenth birthday.

There will be various interpretations
of this diabolical bargain. Mine is this: Dr. Parnassus
has a simple marionette show in London. He is an old man,
probably demented, given to fantasies—which are
perhaps the one plus that senility offers its victims.
He transports himself, through the marionette show, to
a world of vivid imagination. He is a man perturbed by
the deterioration of communication (emails now replace
the eloquent writing of past centuries) and he wants to
show the crowd the magic that imagination can bring.

However it could take another pact with
the devil to convert this into a really good movie. As
it stands, Imaginarium looks like part wet dream,
part nightmare, turning the production into a rambling
show of expensive CGI without a center—again, just
like a dream. A narrative even with the cogency of a Monty
Python skit is strangely missing from the film. This lack
of coherence is puzzling considering that Terry Gilliam's,
The Fisher King, dealt effectively and fancifully
with the story of a former professor who is traumatized
by the murder of his wife.

Here, strictly in the old man’s
mind (again, my interpretation), a white-bearded, tired
and raggedy Doctor Parnassus, now thousands of years old
based on the pact with Satan in the guise of Mr. Nick
(Tom Waits), drags around a wagon, a trick mirror serving
as a partition. When a character goes through the reflecting
door, or is pushed through, she is transported like Alice
in Wonderland to a playground, a beautiful vista that
might remind one of the heaven imagined by Susie Salmon
in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. Nightmarish
views exist as well, such as the presence of Tony (Heath
Ledger), dangling from a hangman’s rope who, after
being saved, does a poor job of ad-libbing, using “you-know”
so many times you’d think he was considering a run
for U.S. Senator from New York. The stage is inhabited
by the old man’s daughter, Valentina, and by a midget,
Percy (the ubiquitous Verne Troyer), and also by a heavily
made-up Anton (Andrew Garfield), who in one point is changed
into one of the little people.

The rambling activities that follow,
actions that consist largely of clowning around, pratfalls,
image-changes, become enough to drive even imaginative
people in the audience to wonder, “What’s
up? Is there any plot, or is this picture merely visually
arresting (when not cheesy) but evoking no particular
narrative?” The character of Tony is inhabited not
only by Heath Ledger, who died during the production,
but also by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell, who
look almost embarrassed at what they are going through—or
is that simply my projection?

If any guild gives awards for make-up,
Ailbhe Lemass, Sarah Monzani, Patty York and Krista Young
deserve mention. Maybe there should even be an award for
costume designer Monique Prodhomme. The film itself, unfortunately,
is full of sound, fury, and kaleidoscopic CGI, signifying
(fill in the blank).

If you read John Carlin’s book
Playing the Enemy, you will realize that the
title has a double meaning. One deals with the competition
of South Africa’s rugby team in its thrust toward
the World Cup in 1995. The other relates to the unusual
fact that when South Africa’s rugby team played
England, the majority of South Africans in the audience
cheered for England! This would be like seeing New York
flying the flags at half staff when the New York Yankees
won the World Series. Like most of the story, one which
is visually and impressively rendered on film directed
by septuagenarian Clint Eastwood, there is considerable
symbolism in the hostile gesture by the audience for the
home team. Rugby is a sport that came to South Africa
during Britain’s long rule over that territory,
a sport that has been called “a hooligans’
game played by gentlemen,” the gentlemen being whites
primarily of the British persuasion. As Eastwood photographed
the segments of the game, we here in the U.S. can see
similarities with football but also with soccer. The big
difference is that rugby players spend their time on the
field slamming into one another without protective gear.
This is probably the roughest sport any of us have seen,
even more grueling than boxing. Even eight-year-olds in
the audience for this PG-13 movie who understand nothing
of the country’s politics or who think that South
Africa is located in Greenland will appreciate their night
out at least for that.

The movie is overlong and is thoroughly
conventional, with an arc that can be predicted by 100%
of theater audiences who might prefer to see a game with
which they are familiar, like soccer or football. Nonetheless
there is much going for the excursion to Johannesburg’s
Ellis Stadium, which Eastwood’s CGI team populates
with over 60,000 wildly cheering spectators and an array
of flags that makes the place look like the U.N.

The movie is imagined by scripter Anthony
Peckham who adapts Carlin’s book and is based on
an actual event that makes Mandela come out like saint.
Nelson Mandela, who had spent 27 years in a Jo’berg
jail for his activities with the pro-liberation African
National Congress which had held numerous strikes and
bombings against the white policy of apartheid (strict
segregation of the races), had the opportunity when elected
the first black president of his republic to drive the
entire white population out of the country. However, noting
that the whites had much to offer South Africa in addition
to still controlling the police and the military, he is
determined to keep them where they are while preventing
a brewing civil war from erupting. To do this he used
sports, specifically rugby, an unusual choice given that
the almost all-white team drew boos from the black audience
who rooted for the other side. As played winningly by
Morgan Freeman, with a credible physical resemblance to
Mandela, the nation’s first black president determines
to kill two birds with one ball, showing the white population
(only about ten percent of the population) that he fully
supports the rugby team while encouraging the blacks to
cheer them on. When the team, after a disastrous game
with England, begins to pick up steam—not really
believable given their desperate condition—and has
a chance to win the World Cup when South Africa hosted
the game in 1995, the entire country came around. Civil
War: averted.

Matt Damon, slimmed down after being beefed up for The
Informant!, turns out a realistic performance as
the captain of the team, feeding them the usual rah-rah
pep talks. What really inspires the crew, however, is
Nelson Mandela’s personal contact with the young
men. The president learns the name of each member, going
out to the field amid feverish audience cheers, greeting
the players by name and wishing all good luck. From then
on, bring on the championship New Zealand team, one led
by a 270-pound Maori who is given the ball on almost every
play, the Kiwis all but certain that he will mow down
the opponents.

This is Morgan Freeman’s movie.
We learn something about the president’s character,
even more than we might have absorbed from years of reading
the papers and watching CNN. He has a quiet demeanor,
chats with the staff as though all are on an equal plane,
asking members of the security team—which he deliberately
integrates half white, half black, about their families.
The eight members of the his personal guard stand in for
the entire country. Wary of one another at first, they
learn to feel genuine affection as a working group, a
welcome change considering that the black head of the
guards virtually stormed into Mandela’s office to
ask why he assigned people who may well have taken part
in brutal punishments against the blacks. It’s a
wonder that after spending a third of his life in a tiny
cell, Mandela has lost all desire for vengeance. His African
National Congress still receives a large majority of the
vote, and while South Africa has serious problems—Jo’Berg
is the most crime-ridden city on the continent, poverty
with its accompanying shanties still exist, unemployment
is high—this one man was been able to avert civil
war and a breakup of a country whose citizens speak English,
Africaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Basotho, Venda, Tswana, Tsonga,
Swazi and Ndebele. Yet even two years previous to the
game, Mandela had already won the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize.
Check out the movie and you’ll appreciate why.

A better title but one that might not
be favored by writer-director Nancy Meyers would be “It’s
Old-Hat.” This cliché-ridden, overlong romantic
comedy with its haute bourgeois personalities appears
to have much in common with some of Woody Allen’s
works, given the financially successful albeit neurotic
people on display, though this time there are no nerds.
Meyers’ output, which mirrors the themes found here,
includes her remake of Father of the Bride, the
story of George, an ordinary, middle-class man whose 21
year-old daughter has decided to marry a man from an upper-class
family. In Father, the main character thinks
that life without his daughter would not be worth living.
George is a man who has to grow up, a theme repeated in
Myer's latest movie.

Meyers’-type rom-coms, though
they revolve around families rather than young lovers,
are called chick flicks, and I suppose It’s
Complicated fits into that category. Since the three
principals in the romantic triangle are middle-aged, the
audience for this film is not likely to be 20-somethings
who might spend half their movie viewing time staring
at their iPhones and whose thumbs-down action probably
has more to do with texting than with evaluating the quality
of the movies. Meryl Streep, for example, is sixty years
old, believe it or not, and contrary to the Hollywood
formula she is wooed by a younger guy (Alec Baldwin is
fifty-one, though his rotund figure makes him look older).

This conventional romance could have
connected the dots well enough by shaving twenty to thirty
minutes. The plot, which finds two men competing for the
affection of a woman, is padded by silly scenes of middle-aged
friends of Jane (Meryl Streep), women played by Mary Kay
Place and Rita Wilson, who giggle and jump up and down
like schoolgirls when they hear that Jane is having (gasp)
an affair! For her part, Jane does quite a bit of giggling,
not only when she takes a few tokes on some weed or when
she sips Tanqueray, champagne and red wine, but when she
is in the presence of her ex-husband, Jake (Alec Baldwin)—the
laughs standing in for what should have been Preston-Sturges
style wit and irony.

The main thread of the story finds Jake,
whose 19-year-long marriage to Jane ended ten years previously
as a result of his adultery, chasing after his ex-wife—not
an unusual occurrence with people in real life. As he
is about to cheat on his current, much younger spouse,
Agness (Lake Bell), we know that this guy is never going
to be a stay-at-home fellow. At the same time, Jane is
courted by her architect, Adam (Steve Martin), a man with
whom she has little chemistry and who appears stiffly
embarrassed to be in the same picture. Jane’s daughters,
like her best friends, serve principally to look wide-eyed
at many of the things their mom tells them about her new
romance.

The characters are all successful people.
Jake is a lawyer who zips up to Jane’s fabulous
Santa Barbara home and to her upscale restaurant in a
Porsche; Adam is a successful architect; and Jane’s
restaurant is a popular one. None of these people appear
to have to work many hours, given all the leisure they
have to deal with friends and families. This is the kind
of movie that people may want to see particularly in these
times of recession, as was true during the 1930’s
when nobody felt like watching or reading The Grapes
of Wrath. But for those seeking just a modicum of
originality, It’s Complicated is not the
film, as it simply shows older people acting like adolescents.

Leap Year is a surprisingly
lovely way to kick off 2010. No, it’s not Avatar,
The Hurt Locker or even Julie and Julia.
But it’s a pleasant chick-flick that entertains
and romances it’s audience by giving them a pretty
good love story starring two very enchanting creatures.

The smile began within the first few
seconds of celluloid flicker as Amy Adams walked across
the screen. How do you not smile? How do you not root
for her? How do you not love her? I want to see her play
a serial killer who dismembers babies. Bet I’ll
still root for her and love her. Damn babies had it coming
for crying! But I digress…

Seriously, she is the Audrey Hepburn
of our time; a charming, captivating and adorable actress
who can actually act. So, Leap Year was off to
grand start just by showing her walking. That’s
all it took to hook, so to speak.

Ah, but a few frames later we are introduced
to Matthew Goode, a sexy and winning actor who’s
shown great promise in Match Point, The Lookout,
Brideshead Revisited and A Single Man.
Smoldering, I believe is the best adjective to describe
him.

Quick plot summary: Adams plays Anna,
a woman in a four-year relationship with Jeremy (a deliberately
bland Adam Scott). He must go to Ireland on business.
She grows tired of waiting for a marriage proposal and
takes it upon herself to follow an Irish tradition of
asking a man to marry her on February 29th of a leap year.
As luck, via contrived script shifts, would have it, a
bad storm forces her into the presence of Declan (Goode)
who agrees to take her to Dublin.

The fact that we know how this story
is going to turn out makes no never mind. The joy is in
the watching; watching Adams and Goode spar, take to the
road and--surprise—fall in love! Along the gloriously
Hollywood way, she converses with a few cows, slides away
from a castle into mud and vomits on Goode’s shoes.
Very romantic. No, really. Trust me.

I do have one major complaint: as I
watched the credits roll, still smiling, I realized that
this was another tinseltown saga of how the working class
man is better than the educated professional. First off,
the lesser-schooled gent is always hotter and the smart
guy is always ethically and/or morally challenged. This
goes way back to the early days of the studio system.
Thinking about the sad state of a country where many of
its people can actually admire absolute idiots like Sarah
Palin, this oft-filmed cliché really bothered me.
I felt a frown forming.

Within its brief eighty-one minute
run, Mine mines issues pertaining to the law,
class, culture, natural disasters, geography, and pet
lore. Yet somehow, because of its languid pace, its laid-back
guitar soundtrack and its matter-of-fact storytelling
in which even despairing owners of missing dogs tell their
stories almost as though disconnected, Mine does
not become a three-hanky movie. Maybe that’s all
to its credit: we have enough Hallmark-style pics out
there, the latest being the heavily marketed CBS Films’
Extraordinary Measures. What we do come away
with after watching Mine, is a look at how much
dogs, and to some extent cats, mean everything to some
of their owners and virtually nothing to others, the rich
and poor lining up in both categories of humankind.

In the wake of Katrina, the New Orleans
hurricane which ranks as one of our country’s most
destructive natural disasters—so serious that half
of the families who were evacuated in 2005 have not returned
to the Big Easy - dogs and cats became separated from
their human families largely because evacuation teams
would not allow them to leave with their owners. Four-legged
family members were left behind, terrified; their cries
for their people unanswered, their wagging tails unseen.

Director Geralyn Pezanoski concentrates her film on the
stories of a few despairing pet owners who made frantic
efforts to retrieve their pets. Mine
tracks the first attempts at rescue made by volunteer
teams which descended on New Orleans. They broke into
homes, many of which had been almost completely destroyed
with nothing remaining to show that this area was a kitchen,
that one a living room. One rescue pair held down an air
conditioner to allow a participant to squeeze his way
through a window. Others burrowed under the soil to retrieve
dogs and cats that were reluctant to come out of their
heretofore hiding places. As Pezanoski trained her digital
video camera week after week on the unfolding drama, she
caught owners and foster families, humane society employees
and lawyers, each giving a spiel about his or her role
in the tragedy of the lost pets.

The stand-out person was eighty-something
Malvin Cavalier, a jes’ folks type of individual
whose mixed maltese disappeared, winding up outside the
U.S. with a woman who took the dog in. An elderly retired
nurse was separated from her true love, a black Labrador
retriever named Murphy Brown, a loss that had her searching
the ‘net endlessly to find the one out of thousands
of labs that would answer to the name Murphy. One fellow,
who repeatedly stated “I just can’t understand…”
wonders why the person who took in his dog simply refused
to return it, which thereupon led Ms. Pezanoski to consider
the ethical question: why should a dog, owned by a poor
New Orleans resident who had not taken care of having
it altered or giving it proper veterinary care, be returned
when the pooch could have a much better life with a middle-class
family somewhere else in the country? A clear case can
be made for allowing foster families to keep pit bulls,
already heavily scarred from fights organized by their
low-life owners. And if said pooches had bonded with the
new foster families and stayed with them for three years
or more, would the rights of the foster family trump those
of the original owners?

Some results are noted. Malvin Cavalier’s
dog was returned. Another owner was told by a foster parent
that he would return the dog, but then disappeared. The
retired nurse died. Some New Orleans residents stated
in their wills that upon their demise, the dogs should
be sent back to the foster families.

Doubtless some viewers and critics will say that given
the enormity of the disaster, too much attention is being
paid to canines and felines, thereby, perhaps, trivializing
the monumentally tragic events. However there is room
in our society to allow for concerns about the welfare
or animals. Not every do-gooder must concentrate on the
plights of human beings, people who have lost far more
than their dogs and who may never return to the city of
their birth. Ultimately, Mine
is an informative documentary which is well worth seeing.

In a key segment of this gut-punching,
superbly edited documentary, we hear that Daniel Ellsberg’s
defense team made sure that few if any middle-aged people
would serve on the Ellsberg trial jury. The reason? Many,
probably most of these folks had probably ignored the
call of principles in order to advance their careers.
Ellsberg was not of that sort. He gave up his career and
friends, although not family, by blowing the whistle on
a set of lies that successive presidential administrations
had been telling the people. (The government lies? What
a surprise!)

Stop people on the street and ask them
this: Suppose you found out that a high government official,
trusted by officials as high as the President and given
security clearance, stole top secret documents from a
confidential file. He then sent those documents to the
press, particularly the country’s most influential
newspaper, the New York Times, papers that he would never
have had access to had he not be given security clearance.
What would you think of the fellow? Doubtless the majority
of people on the street would tell you that such a guy
is a traitor, a deceiver, a snake, someone who took advantage
of his privileged position to trash the very administration
that appointed him.

Hmmm. One wonders whether those who
see this documentary would agree that Daniel Ellsberg
should have been jailed, particularly since the high-level
papers he released affected not only his own country but
an enemy nation with which the U.S. was involved in a
major war.

The story is this: Ellsberg, who had
military credentials as a former first lieutenant in the
U.S. Marines where he spent the happiest years of his
life, was a brilliant man, a Ph.D. who had a position
in the U.S. administration as a war planner. While presidents
from Eisenhower to Kennedy, from Johnson to Nixon, repeatedly
told the American people that the Vietnam War was, first,
one for which U.S. involvement would be limited to an
advisory capacity. Later Presidents Johnson and Nixon
lied about the illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos and
covered up the atrocities being committed by our own side
(of course the other side was at least as guilty, but
we’re supposed to be above that sort of thing.)

Let me cite a parallel, imaginative
situation. Let’s say you are ardently pro-Israel,
a high official of that country’s government with
access to confidential documents. You discover a paper
indicating that the Prime Minister and his cabinet have
no intention whatever of giving Palestinians an independent
state ever, though the government repeatedly blames the
other side for the lack of progress. Would you be a hero
or a traitor for turning a shekel?

Hey! It’s to the enormous credit
of this film that such questions can be evoked in the
audience!

So when you watch this picture, think
of that overriding question. Meanwhile Judith Ehrlich
and Rick Goldsmith, who direct this wonderful doc, make
clear their view that Ellsberg is a hero, even though
Henry Kissinger dubbed him “the most dangerous man
in America.” During the early seventies while the
Vietnam was hot and heavy with over half a million American
soldiers in that godforsaken country, Ellsberg stole secret
documents that indicated a cover-up of atrocities with
wildly overoptimistic statements about American progress.
He Xeroxed 7000 pages—and remember that Xerography
was in an infant stage in the early seventies—delivered
the docs to the NYTimes which printed the report until
the newspaper was enjoined by the court. The papers were
delivered to one paper after another, one step ahead of
injunctions, until the whole country knew that the war
was lost. Nixon, who compulsively and self-destructively
taped all his conversations in the oval office, let loose
with obscenities about both Dr. Ellsberg and the New York
Times—and Vietnam as well—all this information
leading to humorous segments of the film.

In addition to the talking heads that
include his wife Patricia and son Robert, journalist Tom
Oliphant, historian Howard Zinn, Washington bureau chief
for the NY Times Max Frankel and Republic Congressman
Pete McCloskey, considerable time is spent on archival
films, including graphic detail on the saturation bombing
of that small country, the atrocities on the ground, a
few funny animations when archival work was not available.
We’re told in the epilogue that two million Vietnamese
and fifty-eight thousand Americans were killed in this
unnecessary war.

So why is this film, seemingly dated
with facts know by everyone middle-aged and above, shown
now? Obvious parallels with the Iraq War exist. ‘nuff
said. Good show.

Nine is a "wedding
cake" of a film that will entice viewers and make
them ravenous to "Be Italian." The story begins
in an empty Rome film studio. The protagonist, Guido (played
by Daniel Day Lewis), is inside the dark sound stage imagining
glorious scenes for a film for which he has been unable
to write even the first page of the script. This non-scripted
filming is to begin immediately, costumes are being designed,
actors are arriving, there is a press conference and our
beleaguered writer/director is overwhelmed by writer's
block and unable to create his ninth film.

So instead of slogging through, Guido
escapes. He runs to a resort where, he is unfaithful to
his beautiful wife Luisa (played by Marion Cotillard),
cavorting with his lusty/busty mistress Carla (played
by Penelope Cruz). He simultaneously dallies with an American
fashion journalist, Stephanie (played by Kate Hudson).
He even finds time to reminisce about his first object
of lust, a buxom whore played by Fergie. When he is finally
forced to return to Rome (his wife has discovered his
dalliance), and his star and muse Claudia (played by Nicole
Kidman), confronts him about his lack of script, there
is no real confrontation - they take a romantic walk through
the streets or Rome . This walk that Guido and Claudia
take through the streets of Rome is one of the most beautiful
scenes in the film. In the words of Guido's wife Luisa,
Guido is only an appetite.

But while Guido is being non-productive
and irresponsible, his imagination is soaring, visualizing
stunning musical production numbers starring all the women
in his life. Kate Hudson is a go-go dancer, clad in gold
hot pants. Fergie and a cast of seemingly hundreds dance
on a sound stage, covered in sand. Nicole Kidman and Judi
Dench each perform dazzling Broadway style numbers. His
life Luisa is a dancer at a sailor's bar. Director Rob
Marshall (of Chicago fame) handles these flights
of fancy in a seamless manner - one moment we are in "reality"
and the next we soar away with Guido's desire.

The film is blessed with a stellar cast
of actors beginning with the incomparable Sophia Loren.
Daniel Day Lewis recreates the sexual animal he played
in the 1988 classic, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Penelope Cruz plays a voraciously sexual woman, a role
that should catapult her to Award Heaven. Marion Cotillard
is simply delightful as is Nicole Kidman. And who knew
about Fergie? All of the actors need to start prepping
their Oscar acceptance speeches; they will all be there.

Did Alfred Lord Tennyson know whereof
he spoke when he said:
“I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."

Now that’s debatable. Tennyson wrote “In Memoriam”
in 1850, but things may have changed. Anyone who has experienced
the loss of a significant other, a great love—whether
through death or marital separation or divorce—goes
through the kind of hell described by Dante, and Dante's
seventh layer at that. A Single Man looks into
the issue of grief and finds not necessarily in favor
of Tennyson. Good for Tom Ford, who wrote the film as
well as directed it, adapting his script from Christopher
Isherwood’s novel which told the story of a life
on a single day in October 1962. Almost buried in the
details of a lost love is the timing of the story, which
takes place when the world almost went up in smoke because
the Russians insisted on sneaking missiles into Cuba.
This scenario might have scared the principal character,
George (Colin Firth), if he were not depressed by a more
apocalyptic crisis: Jim (Matthew Goode), his lover for
the past sixteen years, was killed instantly in a car
accident, leaving George with little desire to live. When
George loads his revolver, we’re reminded of Chekhov’s
statement that “if you see a gun in Act One, it
will go off in Act Three.” We’ll leave the
reader in suspense: see the movie and you’ll find
out if Chekhov rings true.

A Single Man is photographed
with great style by Eduard Grau under writer-director
Ford’s supervision. Grau uses desaturated colors
when George is feeling down and deep color when he reminisces
about his Great Love. Among the vivid, and most compelling
stylistic touches are two males swimming nude in the waters
by a Los Angeles beach, a slow-motion look at George as
he takes his Mercedes to work and waves at the all-American
couple living next door, extreme close-ups of eyes as
when George meets the stare of another with whom he may
share his gay lifestyle. Even his old flame and present-day
adviser, Charley (Julianne Moore), is shown brushing her
eyelashes as though she were sitting right on the laps
of audience members. There is considerable substance as
well as style, courtesy of Colin Firth’s characterization
of a 52-year-old English college professor at a small
but leafy Los Angeles college. Now, burdened with his
loneliness, he wonders whether he is even reaching his
students. Only one 19-year-old in the class, Kenny (Nicholas
Hoult), has connected, and strongly, enough to stalk the
professor into a dangerous, possible relationship crossing
the boundaries of teacher-student ethics. It helps the
credibility to state that Colin Firth looks ten years
younger than his professed professorial age.

Scenes include George’s quick
encounter with Carlos (Jon Kortajerena), a street hustler
originally from Madrid, who is up for a quickie, and an
especially strong scene with Charley, who has invited
him for dinner, dolling herself up in the hopes of a seduction
and a revival of her relationship with George. Two lonely
souls pass each other in the night offering the chance
for a new life, but even here George seems more interested
in a night at the beach and a trip back to his lavish
home with young Kenny, whose skinny-dip into the Pacific
is remembered by novelist Isherwood thus: "He washes
away thought, speech, mood, desire, whole selves, entire
lifetimes, again and again he returns, becoming always
cleaner, freer, less."

Yes, there are things that a novel can
do better than a movie. Here in the cinema, we lose the
chance to use our book-reading imagination, but gain in
so many other ways given this somber, yet riveting visual
gaze at the bottomless pit of loneliness.